General Questions

Q. What is App Studio?
A. App Studio is an integrated set of digital design and publishing tools from Quark that anyone can use to create customized iPad® (and soon Android) apps, distribute those apps through the Apple® App Store, and then design, test, and publish content (issues) that your customers can optionally purchase and download from within your apps.

Q. What is the difference between QuarkXPress and App Studio?
A. QuarkXPress is design and publishing software for creating high-end, rich design for multiple media, including print, the Web (SWF/Flash®), e-books, and tablets. QuarkXPress provides design, enrichment, and file export functions for creating interactive content (issues) for digital devices such as the iPad. App Studio is a complimentary set of publishing tools — including App Studio Factory, the App Studio Publishing Portal, and Quark Issue Previewer — that lets any user create customized apps, distribute them through the Apple App Store, and then design, test, and publish issues for their apps.

Q. Is App Studio available for Windows?
A. The interactive enrichment features for App Studio issues are part of QuarkXPress and are available in both the Mac and Windows versions of QuarkXPress 9.1 and later. Both Mac and Windows users can do issue design and creation for App Studio apps. App Studio Factory, which is used to create iPad apps, is included with the Mac and Windows versions of QuarkXPress, but is a Mac OS X-only application. The Apple iOS Developer Program, which you must join in order to access the iOS Simulator and submit your apps to Apple, is also Mac OS X-only.

Q. Why is App Studio Factory Mac-only?
A. In order to submit apps to the iTunes Store, users must be enrolled in the iOS Developer Program. The tools that are required as part of this program — including Xcode and the iOS Simulator — are Mac OS X-only. Consequently, App Studio Factory is also Mac OS X-only. This may change in the future when support for other devices is added.

Q. How long will an app stay on the Apple App Store once it’s created and published using App Studio?
A. Apps created with App Studio will remain available on the App Store for as long as you require. Quark’s issue and app configuration fees do not limit the lifetime of an app. The app template license that you purchase includes 12 months of free updates. This means as Quark updates app templates with new features and compatibility with new iOS versions, those updates are available to you. After the first 12 months, though, you may want to re-purchase the template to continue to have access to app template updates.

Q. With Apple App Store guidelines and their 30% fee in mind, is it possible to embed your own storefront within apps created with App Studio?
A. It is possible to create storefronts within apps created with App Studio, but any sales generated through the App Store will be subject to the 30% fee from Apple. This is Apple’s policy, and they enforce it rigidly.

Pricing Questions

Q. How much does it cost to create and publish to an iPad app?
A. If you have purchased QuarkXPress 9, there is no up-front investment. You only pay when you’re ready to publish your apps and issues. Just as importantly, there are no on-going financial commitments to Quark once your app and content has been published. See our pricing page for more details.

Q. Are there any recurring fees for App Studio?
A. With App Studio, you purchase an app template license and an issue license pack. Each time you wish to publish a new issue to your app, you will need to purchase a new issue license pack or redeem one of the issue licenses that you have already purchased. These are one-off license costs, per app and per issue. So once an app and an issue has been published, there is no on-going cost to you. In the case of an app template license, your purchase includes 12 months of app template updates. After 12 months, you must repurchase an app template if you want to continue to have access to updates for that app template. You are under no obligation to do so, though, and your app and content can continue to exist in the iTunes store for as long as you wish.

Q. Who hosts my app and issue files?
A. Your app is always hosted by Apple. If you choose a single embedded-issue app, both the app and the issue will also be hosted by Apple. In all other cases, you are responsible for hosting issue files on a publicly accessible Web server that your app will be able to access.

Q. Your pricing includes a couple of different components. If I were to advise a user how to approximate the cost of creating an app with QuarkXPress 9.1, what is the best equation?
A. The best approach is to decide what sort of app is required and the frequency with which you expect to publish content (issues) to that app. For example, if a user wants to create a single embedded-issue app where the app and issue are self-contained and there will not be additional issues published to that app, the cost for an Apple developer account is $99, the app template license costs $149, and a one-issue license pack costs $349. So the starting price is $498 plus the cost of your Apple iOS Developer Program membership. The only additional costs to consider are the Web hosting costs for your issue files (not required for single embedded-issue apps, where both the app and the issue are hosted by Apple).

Q. Can I update an issue once it’s been published to my app?
A. Yes, you can easily update the content once it has been published simply by switching out the issue file on your Web server. However, customers who have already downloaded that issue to their iPad will not get the updated version.

You can also update the app once it has been published. The app template license you purchase includes 12 months of template updates. So while your app can continue to exist in the iTunes store, after 12 months you may want to re-purchase the app template license in order to gain a further 12 months of app template updates.

Feature Specific Questions

Q. I can see why syncing vertical and horizontal page numbers is a helpful feature, but what if I don’t want the pages to match up between the two layouts?
A. The idea behind syncing page numbers automatically is to eliminate the need for designers to have to check and recheck that each page in the vertical layout has an appropriate corresponding page in the horizontal layout. This is important because when a user rotates a device, each page must have a corresponding page in the alternative layout. You may want the same issue of a publication to have different numbers of pages on different devices, and in that case you can create different layout families. If you do not require dual orientations, you can export an issue file from a Print layout, but you will lose the benefits of working with layout families for multiple orientations and devices.

Q. What is a layout family?
A. A layout family synchronizes a publication’s design between devices and orientations (horizontal and vertical), including page count and page sequence.

Q. Do the images in the horizontal and vertical layouts have to be different?
A. No. Some images work better in a horizontal view while others work better in a vertical view — some work great in both.

Q. My scrollable layout is too long. Do I have to fill all of the space to avoid showing an empty layout when I export?
A. No. In cases where the content does not fill a scrollable layout, white space is identified and omitted.

Q. What if I need my scrollable layout to be longer than the maximum page height in QuarkXPress?
A. You can optionally join pages together on export of an issue file. This allows you to create a longer scrollable layout from multiple sequential pages.

Q. Does App Studio support audio?
A. Yes. You can create both audio and video players in an App Studio issue.

Q. Is the fading of text at the top and bottom of an article in a scrollable layout an automatic feature?
A. Since the text fade indicator is an attribute of a box, the designer can decide whether to use it or not and how many pixels the fade covers.

Q. Do I have to install Xcode?
A. You must install Xcode to be able to use the iOS Simulator, but you will never have to use Xcode directly or look at programming code.

Q. Where does the AVE file format come from?
A. The AVE file format was created by a partner, Aquafadas. Their technology powers many of the App Studio features.

Q. Can users do dynamic advertising within the apps built with App Studio?
A. App Studio has support for Web views, which enable you to embed or reference HTML from within an issue file. Because App Studio uses WebKit, App Studio files can support anything that WebKit on the iPad supports. This can include dynamic ads that are controlled by the publisher and dynamic ads delivered via an ad network such as Google.

Q. Will App Studio support the creation of apps for Android, webOS, BlackBerry, or Windows?
A. Currently App Studio only supports iPad apps. We expect to add the ability to create apps for other mobile device operating systems in the near future, starting with Android.

Q. Does App Studio support resizable, searchable, and/or selectable text?
A. No, not at this time.

Q. You rolled out support for App Studio through Quark Publishing Platform using QuarkXPress 8.5. Does Quark Publishing Platform work with App Studio and QuarkXPress 9?
A. Quark Publishing Platform is not necessary for using App Studio with QuarkXPress 9, but Quark Publishing Platform users do get greater automation and collaboration capabilities through App Studio. For example, they now can build workflows for digital assets and publications in Quark Publishing Platform.